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The End and the Beginning: The Book of My Life - Open Book Publishers

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First published in Germany in 1929, The End and the Beginning is a lively memoir of a vanished world and of a rebellious young woman’s struggle to achieve independence.

Born in 1883 into a distinguished and wealthy aristocratic family of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hermynia Zur Mühlen spent much of her childhood traveling in Europe and North Africa with her diplomat father. After five years on her German husband’s estate in czarist Russia she broke with both her family and her husband and set out on a precarious career as a professional writer committed to socialism. As well as translating many leading contemporary authors, notably Upton Sinclair, into German, she herself published an impressive number of politically engaged novels, detective stories, short stories, and children’s fairy tales. Because of her outspoken opposition to National Socialism, she had to flee her native Austria in 1938 and seek refuge in England, where she died, virtually penniless, in 1951.

This revised and corrected translation of Zur Mühlen’s memoir—with extensive notes and an essay on the author by Lionel Gossman—will appeal especially to readers interested in women’s history, World War I, and the culture and politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Seven free online supplements are also provided, containing additional original material including a selection of newly translated stories by Zur Mühlen, biographical essays by Gossman and a portfolio of images.

The Federal Ministry of Education, Art, and Culture, Department of Literature (/BMUKK-Kultur; Literaturabteilung/), Vienna, Austria, has generously contributed towards the publication of this volume.

Since publication this book has been viewed 6,694 times (last updated July 2015).

Lionel Gossman is M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Romance Languages (Emeritus) at Princeton University. Most of his work has been on seventeenth and eighteenth-century French literature, nineteenth-century European cultural history, and the theory and practice of historiography. His publications include Men and Masks: A Study of Molière; Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment; French Society and Culture: Background for 18th Century Literature; The Empire Unpossess’d: An Essay on Gibbon’s "Decline and Fall”; Between History and Literature; Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas; The Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck’s "Italia und Germania”; and several edited volumes: The Charles Sanders Peirce Symposium on Semiotics and the Arts; Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the Beginnings of Comparative Literature in the United States (with Mihai Spariosu); Geneva-Zurich-Basel: History, Culture, and National Identity, and Begegnungen mit Jacob Burckhardt (with Andreas Cesana). He is also author of Brownshirt Princess: A Study of the 'Nazi Conscience' and The Passion of Max von Oppenheim: Archaeology and Intrigue in the Middle East from Wilhelm II to Hitler, and editor and translator of On History a collection of essays by Jules Michelet, all published by Open Book Publishers.

"This translation is something
of an event. For the first time, it makes Zur Mühlen’s text available to
English-speaking readers in a reliable version."

— David MidgleyReader in German Literature and CultureUniversity of Cambridge

"Hermynia
Zur Mühlen's eminently readable memoir of her remarkable life gives a
fascinating account not only of the various stages of her global and
multicultural experiences but also of the European period from the late
19th to early 20th century. She possesses an almost uncanny talent for
bringing to life the whole period as an astute and critical
contemporary. One can only admire her gift as narrator and her sharp
analytical ability. No wonder she was so highly regarded during the
Weimar Period in Germany. Lionel Gossman's translation is both accurate
and congenial, his 'Notes on Persons and Ends' provide a treasure trove
of information. One can only hope that this important discovery finds
many readers."